Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories

Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories
Christopher Castiglia
boundary 2, Volume 27, Number 2, Summer 2000, pp. 149-175 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
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Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories
Christopher Castiglia
‘‘All profound changes in consciousness by their very nature, bring

with them characteristic amnesia,’’ Benedict Anderson writes, explaining the
rise of national identity from a deep historical and historiographical dialectic
of memory and forgetting; ‘‘out of such oblivions, in specific historical cir-
cumstances, spring narratives.’’ 1 In this essay, I will focus on the formation of
a subcultural or countercultural, rather than national or supercultural, iden-
tity. My premise will be that the last decade has witnessed a profound shift
I thank David Bergman, George Chauncey, Shad Christopoulos, Allen Frantzen, Leigh
Gilmore, Ron Gregg, David Halperin, Chris Lane, Susan Manning, Jeff Masten, Anthony
Musillami, Eric Rofes, Alan Sinfield, Marian Staats, Marc Stein, and members of the Work-
shop in Lesbian and Gay Studies at the University of Chicago (particularly Andrew Hos-
tetler, Debbie Nelson, and Beth Povinelli) for talking to me about this essay; they didn’t all
agree, but they all helped. As always, Chris Reed discussed every idea with me with love,
care, and generosity.
1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 204.
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
boundary 2 27:2, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press.

150 boundary 2 / Summer 2000
in sexual subjectivity and that, as Anderson argues will occur with any deep
shift in consciousness, the change has also involved a systematic opera-
tion of amnesia. In contrast to Anderson, however, I want to argue that nar-
rative follows not in the wake of amnesia but precedes it. The last decade
has witnessed a discursive operation that has instigated a cultural forgetting
and, as Anderson argues must happen when popular memory is obliterated,
the substitution of a newly official remembering that can reconstitute sanc-
tioned identity out of historical violence. Like national identities, the sexual
consciousness that emerges from such narratives of forgetting and (selec-
tive and reformulated) memory serves state interests. Cultural amnesia, in
other words, is at the heart of what some are calling the current sex panic:
the systematic assault on sexualities that diverge from the interests of the
privatized and heteronormative reproductive family.
Sex panics are outgrowths of restrictive changes in cultural con-
sciousness, of which the crackdowns on nonnormative sexual spaces by
the police or by zoning boards are only late manifestations.2 In particular,
sex panics cannot take place without a systematic assault on memories that
associate sex and subjectivity in ways that challenge normative regimes.
Different acts of memory, I want to argue, generate and justify different
sexual consciousnesses, which in turn shape divergent theories of the re-
lationships sexual subjects—and here I am talking specifically about urban
gay men—have to social protest and organization.
To demonstrate the connection between memory, sexual subjectivity,
and activism, I want to offer two stories I received by email from gay men in
response to lecture versions of this essay. The older of the two men writes:
I found myself experiencing quite a bit of ‘‘Seventies envy’’ lately—

probably not an uncommon experience for gay men under 35 or 40.
And it’s not really about the unlimited, worry-free, AIDS anxiety-free
sex. It’s more about the kind of intimacy you can experience in pub-
lic sex spaces. In fact, my first such experiences shocked me be-
cause I was so surprised how much better I was treated by gay men
in those spaces as compared to other gay social spaces. Even re-
2. See, for example, Caleb Crain, ‘‘Pleasure Principles: Queer Theorists and Gay Journal-
ists Wrestle over the Politics of Sex,’’ Lingua Franca 7, no. 8 (October 1997): 26–37; Sheryl
Gay Stolberg, ‘‘Gay Culture Weighs Sense and Sexuality,’’ New York Times, 23 Novem-
ber 1997, sec. 4, p. 1; Urvashi Vaid, ‘‘Last Word: Panic or Panacea?’’ Advocate, no. 748
(9 December 1997): 88; and Michael Warner, ‘‘Media Gays: A New Stone Wall,’’ Nation,
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
14 July 1997, 15–19.

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 151
jection is kinder and gentler, and in group scenes, you end up having
sex with men who you might not have sex with otherwise—men who
are both more and less attractive than you are. Not to idealize it, but
it struck me as a relatively democratic and inclusive space as com-
pared to gay bars, for instance (which is not to say that hierarchies
don’t get enacted—the Unicorn would be much worse than the back
room at the Ram, for instance). Anyway, when someone stuck pop-
pers under my nose for the first time, I felt like I was actually trans-
ported back to the Seventies. I felt like I was feeling what ‘‘they’’ must
have felt, our older (or dead) gay brothers (dare I use that term),
some of whom were actually in the room, symbolizing the historical
continuity that so often gets obscured by discourses of ageism. I felt
like I had tapped into some eternal, carnal, homoerotic AND broth-
erly stream of consciousness. Essentialist and sentimental, yes. But
I experienced a much greater sense of community than, for instance,
I ever did in cliquey and self-righteous ACT UP and Queer Nation so-
cial circles. And guess what? I started going to demonstrations again
(ones that benefit lesbians, too!).
The second man, probably ten years younger than the first, has a very differ-
ent story to tell. His narrative begins with his graduation from high school in
1992, but he quickly (in the second sentence) urges me to ‘‘fast-forward’’ two
years to his recognition in college of his newly formed identity as a member
of Generation Q(ueer).
As a fairly representative member of the elite of ‘‘Generation Q’’ . . .

I feel fairly safe in saying that activism, per se, is gasping for its final
breath before falling into oblivion. The reasons are numerous and
with a small amount of investigation obvious. For decades, centuries
even, there was a prevailing feeling of fear and discomfort at the
concept of being a gay individual in society. And it simply no longer
is an issue for most people who are entering adulthood in the late
1990s. Growing up I, as well as numerous of my friends, [was] not
confronted with the sort of oppressive antigay imagery that activ-
ism works so feverishly to eradicate. We don’t feel oppressed, we
don’t feel limited, we don’t WANT to feel the need to be a ‘‘united
front’’—rather what we see is a culture among gay young adults that
is far, far more concerned with individual concerns and causes. This
was a trend that began years ago, it would seem. However, in the
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
1980s what occurred was a regeneration of activist spirit to ‘‘fight

AIDS.’’ Well, it’s been years now—and the community understands

it. And frankly, among many (though I do not speak for all) Gen-
eration Qers, there is a prevailing feeling that ‘‘no one has a body
that’s good enough to die for.’’ Essentially, the sympathy is no longer
there—if someone doesn’t practice safe sexual practices, then it is
THEIR problem. And what we have is a condition in 1990s America
that operates as laudanum for the activist spirit. And you know what?
That’s not bad—in fact, it should be embraced. . . . It has come to the
forefront of young gay intellectuals that by SEPARATING and SEG-
REGATING themselves from the rest of society they are in essence
setting back the clock decades. I feel comfortable in speaking from
the perspective of a young gay man who moves in circles of the rela-
tively cosmopolitan. And as such, allow me to address the major dif-
ficulty for us in terms of activism, as evinced in the 1970s. It evokes
images of the ‘‘whore culture.’’ Who would have thought that ‘‘gay col-
lege guys’’ and ‘‘monogamy’’ would be used in the same sentence
without any negation? Activism had always focused far too much on
‘‘embracing’’ gay culture rather than improving it. . . . Some say that
it is a matter of the abrupt and visible tendencies of the under-25
Queer culture to be considerably more conservative than the over-
25. Rather, I see it as a subconscious rejection of what we are not
comfortable with. . . . People had not been exposed to information
that said ‘‘Yes, you can be gay and have civilized, happy, dating re-
lationships that don’t involve casual sex with whatever guy you find
attractive.’’ . . . It has finally occurred to Generation Q that [in order]
to make any significant progress in our own lives (call it greedy, if you
like) it’s time for gay men to stop thinking with their dicks (excuse the
expression) and start thinking about the future. The buzzword, so to
speak, of Generation Q has been POST GAY. Although rather amor-
phous in definition, it is essentially this feeling that ‘‘queeny protest’’
is out—and getting on with our lives as productive members of so-
ciety is in. . . . Our energies are better spent elsewhere on the ques-
tion of gay prosperity.
One could draw many conclusions from these two accounts, but I
want to focus on the use both men make of memory in sorting out ques-
tions of sexual culture, identity, and activism. Both accounts are memory
narratives that attempt to orient the reader by offering an experience from
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
the past. Yet the second writer quickly expresses a desire (set in the im-
perative mode) to leave the past (‘‘fast-forward . . . ,’’ ‘‘start thinking about
the future’’). The first account, on the other hand, ‘‘fast-forwards’’ to con-
sequences of memory only in its final sentences. Not surprisingly, given
their different reactions to dwelling in the past, the two men arrive at differ-
ent judgments of a previous generation of gay culture. While the first writer
expresses a desire, a fondness, even an ‘‘envy’’ for the 1970s, the second
views that same decade with distaste. Locating the 1970s as the originary
site of ‘‘whore culture’’ and ‘‘queeny protest,’’ the second writer invokes a
memory only to shape it as unhealthy, thereby distancing himself from the
past, whereas the first account, full of envious longing, imagines a connec-
tion that is in part real (both generations join in the activities of the back
room) and in part fantastic (what the writer calls ‘‘sentimental’’). Also not sur-
prisingly, given that the amnesia the second man works toward (he is writing
against those who would ‘‘[set] back the clock’’) is a gesture of distance, he
ends up condemning collectivism: Now that ‘‘the sympathy’’ is gone, there
is no longer any need for a ‘‘united front’’ (although in what might be a mem-
ory trace, he speaks repeatedly for an entire generation). The key terms
in the second man’s understanding of progress are comfort and prosperity,
which are best accomplished through monogamous coupling (dating, as op-
posed to ‘‘group scenes’’) of proud and enterprising individuals (‘‘individual
concerns and causes’’). The chief values expressed in the first account are
quite different, relating to a democratic and inclusive intimacy that is both
sexual and collective.
While I hesitate to present either man as representative of an entire
generation (although each claims something like that for himself), together,
their accounts are richly evocative, I would argue, of competing attitudes
toward memory and collective action (whether of sex or protest or both)
that lie behind recent sex panics and pro-sex activism in cities such as New
York. My motive is not to assess which of the competing memories of the
1970s conjured by these men is empirically more accurate—that is, whether
gay men in the 1970s actually experienced anything like sexual democ-
racy or irresponsible abandon. Those questions I leave to better historians
than I. Rather, my interest is in what the desire for memory or for amnesia
allows each writer to inscribe in the present in relation to his conscious-
ness as a gay man. For the first writer, memory allows him to generate—
for himself if for no one else—a communitas that authorizes his work on
behalf of social transformation. In contrast, I take the second writer’s as-
sumptions—that activism has died and that advances in gay visibility and
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
acceptance are real and permanent—as dangerous, not despite but be-
cause of the things the second writer sees as most characteristic of his gen-
eration. I admire the second man’s dedication to safe sex (even if purchased
through a kind of brutal every-man-for-himselfism) and his confident sense
that ‘‘gay is good’’ (as long as it is his version of gay). Conversely, there are
numerous ways to be critical of the attitudes expressed in the first account,
as the writer himself suggests by repeatedly qualifying his Whitmanesque
utopianism as a series of poststructuralist no-no’s (essentialist and senti-
mental—what could be worse?). I want to argue, nevertheless, that the first
account, with its faith in collectivism, social expansion, and sexual inven-
tiveness, is far more desirable as a narrative of queer sexual culture and as
an antidote to current restrictive attitudes and policies toward nonnorma-
tive sexual practices than is the vision expressed by the spokesman for a
generation nominally more queer than its predecessors. For the values ex-
pressed in the second account (individual prosperity, private coupling, and
intellectual comfort—all those things that get summed up by the writer as
‘‘civilization’’) are exactly the values endorsed by cultural conservatives dur-
ing the long Reagan/Bush years and since.
What I ultimately want to suggest is that the dynamics of identity-
formation may be taken up not to foster sexual conservatism but to resist
heteronormativity through the constructions of countermemories that urge
not amnesia (as conservative narratives, I will argue, do) but a strategic
(that is, purposeful rather than transparent) remembering. Key to that
change from willed amnesia to purposeful memory is a shift in emotional
registers from shame and guilt to desire and elation. As the historian John
Demos notes, guilt is the touchstone in a disciplinary regime that seeks
to make the values of the industrializing nation internalized as the freely
chosen discipline of individual citizens.3 We can see that sex panics rest
on a pedagogical structure that uses guilt about a past—forgotten and then
resurrected as dirty, selfish, and diseased—to instruct subjects in the
‘‘proper’’ values that, as Demos notes, are logically contradictory: on the
one hand, the expansive opportunity promised by individualism, and, on
the other, the regulatory self-control that the individual practices to prevent
her- or himself from fully experiencing that potential. I do not want to sug-
gest that the acts of countermemory I am advocating are not invested in dis-
ciplinary pedagogies. They are. The struggle one sees in the first account
3. John Demos, ‘‘Oedipus and America: Historical Perspectives on the Reception of Psy-
choanalysis in the United States’’ (1978), in Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural
History of Emotional Life in America, ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven,
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997): 63–78.

above, in which the writer seeks to place himself in a cultural setting where
he feels he both does and does not belong, demonstrates that this account,
too, is a parable of identity formation and the necessary self-alienations (the
condition of ‘‘envy’’) it produces. Yet given these two technologies of mem-
ory and identity, I still would argue that strategic countermemory is crucial
to transformative activism in the queer future.
Before taking up the politics of conservative amnesia and queer
countermemories, however, I want briefly to suggest a friendly amendment
to other theoretical and activist responses to contemporary urban sex pan-
ics. Too frequently, these responses focus on panic as occurring spatially
across cultures, leaving culture temporally static, rather than seeing the re-
lationship of spatial to temporal crackdowns. The politics of memory, that
is, are often subsumed by the politics of space: Who has access to public
space, are sex and intimacy limited to monogamous domesticity and the pri-
vately owned home, what is the viability of public sex under the ‘‘quality of
life’’ regime that has been established to ‘‘clean up’’ (rezone and redevelop)
sex clubs, porn theaters, and porn retailers?
The activist focus on spatial politics has found a corollary in queer
theory, which has taken up the issue of ‘‘queer space’’ with remarkable en-
thusiasm and sophistication, but often at the expense of queer memory.
To take but one case in point: In their recent manifesto on queer ‘‘world
making,’’ Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner use the word space as often
as queer and sex, until the terms come to seem synonymous.4 Berlant and
Warner define heteronormativity as ‘‘a sanitized space of sentimental feel-
ing’’ that in turn becomes ‘‘a space of pure citizenship’’ (SP, 549). ‘‘Intimate
life,’’ for Berlant and Warner, ‘‘is the endlessly cited elsewhere of political
public discourse, a promised haven that distracts citizens from the unequal
conditions of their political and economic lives, consoles them for the dam-
aged humanity of mass society, and shames them for any divergence be-
tween their lives and the intimate sphere that is alleged to be simple per-
sonhood’’ (SP, 553). It is the need to protect the phantasmagoric ‘‘zone of
heterosexual privacy’’ (SP, 550) as the exclusive site of sexuality in America
that results in the closing of sex clubs and public sex spaces, represented
as diseased and infantile, in favor of the mature development of private real-
estate interests in areas such as New York’s Times Square. To resist the
development of the ‘‘protected spaces’’ of privatized intimacy that ‘‘straight
4. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘‘Sex in Public,’’ Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (winter
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
1998): 547–66. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as SP.

people inhabit’’ (SP, 555) as the only locations of (a necessarily deferred)

sexual culture and national belonging, Berlant and Warner privilege ‘‘queer
zones and other worlds estranged from heterosexual culture’’ (SP, 547).
Such ‘‘zones’’ challenge ‘‘the project of normalization that has made hetero-
sexuality hegemonic . . . in the hierarchy of property and propriety’’ (SP,
548). In public sex sites—clubs, tearooms, parks, piers, porn theaters—
those engaging nonnormative sexualities undertake the visionary project
‘‘to construct the architecture of queer space in a homophobic environment’’
(SP, 551).
In Berlant and Warner’s essay, varieties of space—zones, havens,
spheres, habitations, property, architecture—predominate, until the pro-
gram for queer ‘‘world making’’ sounds eerily like the rhetoric of the real-
estate development it challenges, moving seamlessly between the archi-
tectural and the utopian: ‘‘The queer world is a space of entrances, exits,
unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying exam-
ples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies’’ (SP, 558).
There is, of course, much to be said for inhabiting the discourse one
combats. By letting the language of real-estate development serve queer
public intimacy, Berlant and Warner provide a powerful and necessary cri-
tique of heteronormative privacy and put forth a compelling defense of the
social networks and queer culture created through public sex. At the same
time, however, the essay threatens to divorce space from memory as linked
technologies of communal intimacy in queer public culture. Berlant and
Warner begin by acknowledging the importance of memory in resisting the
‘‘amnesia archive,’’ which forces immigrants to forget the violences and dis-
avowals that constitute middle-class, white American identity: ‘‘Does be-
lief that normal life is actually possible require amnesia and the ludicrous
stereotyping of a bottom-feeding culture apparently inadequate to inti-
macy?’’ (SP, 556). Yet the politics of memory are quickly subsumed by the
presumed realpolitik of a spatialized panic, evidenced by actions such as
the October 1995 New York City Zoning Test Amendment, the potential re-
sults of which Berlant and Warner report: ‘‘Of the estimated 177 adult busi-
nesses in the city, all but 28 may have to close under this law’’ (SP, 551).
The threat of space invasion, of the government cracking down on
queer culture in the intimate space of porn theaters and tearooms, upholds
the concept of a panic occasioned—even justified—by the policing of physi-
cal spaces of nonnormative sexuality. Activists, however, have often found
themselves backed into a corner by the panic politics of space. When the
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
claim that 61 percent more men were arrested for public sex in 1997 over
previous years was challenged, the statistics provided by New York’s Anti-
Violence Project—eighteen men were arrested in the first half of 1996,
twenty-nine in the first half of 1997—hardly indicated a dramatic crackdown.
Claims of widespread closure of bars and sex clubs have been similarly
disputed by those who argue that many of the city’s best-known establish-
ments have remained open, while others were closed due to license infrac-
tions unrelated to recent rezoning initiatives.5
Despite this skepticism, activists have been unwilling to broaden the
spatialized politics of panic, which serve important psychological and prac-
tical ends. Crackdowns make good spectacle; they are a dramatic tool for
rallying and maintaining activist anger and action. Even more useful (al-
though counterproductive to the critique of identity politics undertaken by
many queer theorists), disputes over space create clear demarcations be-
tween the ‘‘outside’’ and the ‘‘inside,’’ ‘‘them’’ and ‘‘us.’’ The police and the city
become clear enemies, giving a presumed coherence—and innocence—
to the queer world under attack. The notion of a public as a space enables
the asserted division between inside and outside, since it permits a purity of
occupation that translates metaphorically (but not unproblematically) from
physical to cultural space, to what Berlant and Warner refer to as the space
of ‘‘sexual personhood.’’ In this sense, a ‘‘panic’’ functions for queer politics
much as a ‘‘crisis’’ does for dominant ideology, ensuring the affective sutur-
ing of physical space (the nation) and private identity (citizens) in relation to
a common enemy (communism, immigrants, sexual deviants).
Prosex activists are, of course, correct: Queer culture is under as-
sault, the ‘‘normalization’’ of sexuality, hetero- and homo-, dramatically limit-
ing the potential for resistance in communities that have traditionally pre-
sented the strongest challenge to heteronormative nationalism. In bringing
the regulation of sex and intimacy to public debate, activist groups such as
Sex Panic do queer culture an invaluable service. My point is simply this:
By limiting the normalizing of sexuality to spatial politics, Sex Panic threat-
ens to obscure the cultural politics where the affective work of normalization
takes place, sutured to the practices of everyday life as much by narratives
of memory as by physical intimacies. If the city, operating in the interests of
heteronormativity, is panicked over the growth of queer sexual culture, so,
too, are gays and lesbians—including many queers—panicked, not only by
closures and arrests but by the increased normalization of sexual represen-
tation and the concomitant refashioning of intimate memory brought about
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
5. See Crain, ‘‘Pleasure Principles,’’ 26–37.

by years of right-wing politics and AIDS phobia, which are orchestrated to

obliterate memory by re-creating the values of ‘‘the sexual revolution’’ as
deadly and infantile, irresponsible and narcissistic, anything but revolution-
ary. Theorists of trauma have argued that assaultive violence may lead to a
loss or displacement of memory, but it is also true that the loss of memory
may constitute its own trauma.
Gay men have themselves contributed to the normalizing of sexual

representation, as Sex Panic acknowledges in its analyses of neoconser-
vative gay journalists such as Gabriel Rotello, Michelangelo Signorile, and
Andrew Sullivan.6 These men have been criticized for blaming AIDS on gay
sexual culture and calling on the city to regulate the places where sex oc-
curs.7 Grievous as these invitations to state regulation are, they are part and
parcel of a larger strategy to vilify queer memory; more than simply calling
for a crackdown by the city, gay ‘‘neocons’’ enact a form of enforced am-
nesia, cutting off gay men from sexual memories that provide alternative
models of public intimacy and political union. For example, in a segment
of the National Public Radio (NPR) program All Things Considered (‘‘Sex
6. Gabriel Rotello, Michelangelo Signorile, and Andrew Sullivan have been rewarded for
their neoconservatism with unprecedented access to a print public: Rotello and Signo-
rile have served as columnists for New York Newsday and the New York Times, respec-
tively, while Sullivan served as editor of the New Republic. Other neoconservative colum-
nists include Eddie James, winner of the 1997-1998 Randy Shilts Award for Outstanding
Achievement, who began his column for the Baltimore Alternative, ‘‘Sex and Sensibility:
Why Are Some Men Losing the Latex?’’ (February 1998), with this frankly counternostal-
gic linkage of memory and unsafe sex: ‘‘John Travolta, Boogie Nights, disco balls, bell-
bottoms—everywhere you look the signs are painfully clear that the ’70s are back. And
among gay men, a small but growing number are not just embracing the pop cultural kitsch
of the polyester era, they are also adopting its pre-AIDS, anything-goes mentality when it
comes to sex.’’
7. Michael Warner has argued that gay neoconservatives ‘‘repudiate the legacies of the
gay movement—its democratic conception of activism, its goal of political mobilization, its
resistance to the regulation of sex and its aspiration to a queer world.’’ This repudiation of
the legacy of the 1970s legacy allows gay neocons to ‘‘promote a vision of the gay future
as assimilation, and they willingly endorse state regulation of sex to that end. They are
interested in sex only insofar as it lends itself to respectability and self-esteem; and forget
unconscious desire, or the tension between pleasure and normalization, or the diversity
of contacts through which queers have made a world for one another.’’ See ‘‘Media Gays:
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
A New Stone Wall,’’ Nation (14 July 1997), 15.

Clubs and Bathhouses Again Popular with Some Gay Men’’), Rotello begins
his case for closing the baths and sex clubs by drawing a sharp distinction
between the unhealthy behaviors of those traumatically rooted in the past
and the healthy vision of those who can leave that past behind:
On the one hand is the specter of governmental involvement in gay

sexuality, which is something that I don’t think that any gay liberation-
ist or self-respecting gay person welcomes. On the other hand is the
specter of a continuing epidemic that will continue to take the lives of
40 or 50 or 60 percent of all gay men. A rational person would have
to say that the danger of a permanent epidemic is worse. But, un-
fortunately, in the gay world, many people, on this particular subject,
are not rational. Many people are so traumatized by their past as gay
men and by the stigma, and they see the resistance of that as their
primary motivation in gay liberation, rather than actually the saving
of their own community from this cataclysmic holocaust.8
‘‘In the best of all possible worlds,’’ NPR reporter Joe Neel continues, ‘‘Ga-
briel Rotello wants a twenty- to thirty-year period of what he calls sexual
conservatism, where gay men have far fewer partners than they do today.
That, he says, would break the chain of infection. But that also means a
complete break with the past. Gay men must totally rethink the way they
conceive their sexual behavior.’’ Rather than focusing on the historical con-
nections between ‘‘normalcy’’ and its constitutive ‘‘stigma,’’ Rotello blames
the sexual culture of gay men for the ‘‘holocaust’’ of AIDS. In so doing, Ro-
tello establishes ‘‘sexual conservatism’’ as the healthy outgrowth of a willed
amnesia, the sine qua non of gay public life.
For the purposes of the NPR story, addressed to a national audience,
Rotello’s claim that HIV transmission is the inevitable result of gay men’s
traumatic attachment to a pathological past serves the segment’s paternal-
ism, dressing heteronormativity in the drag of liberal benevolence. Taking
its cue from Rotello, the segment becomes a normalizing exercise in the
restructuring of gay male memory. In one case, Mike, a ‘‘thirty-something
professional,’’ HIV-infected gay man, recounts an experience in a New York
bathhouse. Telling Neel, ‘‘I became, first, kind of surprised at the amount of
chances I had to infect other men,’’ Mike remembers an experience with a
younger man who was willing to have unprotected sex until Mike reveals his
8. National Public Radio, All Things Considered, 1 June 1995, purchased print transcript
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
by Burrelle’s Transcripts. Subsequent references are from this transcript.

seropositive status, at which point the younger man tenses up and leaves.
‘‘I spoke to him later,’’ Mike tells Neel, ‘‘and he said, ‘I’m really angry that
I was ready to take that chance.’ ’’ From Mike’s anecdote, Neel concludes:
‘‘In this atmosphere of uninhibited male sexuality, men forget about safe
sex.’’ There is, however, another lesson one could derive from Mike’s story:
that one of the two men didn’t forget about safe sex. Not only did a gay
man take responsibility for a stranger’s health, the later conversation be-
tween the two men demonstrates the communication networks that arise
from ‘‘anonymous’’ public sex and make the circulation of information and
compassion possible. Despite the evidence provided by Mike’s anecdote,
however, Neel attaches a normative moral to a gay man’s memory, a dy-
namic that becomes even more obvious when its object is a gay historian,
Allen Berube, who tells a dissenting story about ‘‘uninhibited’’ gay sex:
For me, it’s the adventure of meeting someone you don’t know and
feeling this erotic charge and you know, exploring them and their
bodies and having conversations and having this kind of bond with
someone that you never met before and may never meet again.
There’s this specialness about this kind of intimacy with a stranger,
that there’s nothing else like it and it’s its own thing. . . . There can
be magic in those moments that really have a lot to do with trusting
strangers. And there’s very few places in this society where that can
happen.
Neel again glosses a gay man’s testimony so as to produce a conventional

moral: Despite Berube’s description of the trust that can arise in public sex,
an account seconded by Mike’s bathhouse memory, Neel declares, ‘‘In New
York, closing some places did send a message to the gay community that
danger lurked in bathhouses and clubs.’’ Again, trust established among gay
men through sex-cultural codes and presented in the form of a memory nar-
rative turns into a tale of lurking danger. Gay voices raised in opposition to
government regulation of public sex are credited in this nationalized debate
only when, like Rotello’s, they denounce the hedonistic trauma of the gay
past, not when they credit, as Mike or Berube do, the alternative public inti-
macies authorized by gay countermemory.
Attempts to authorize sexual conservatism by normalizing gay mem-
ory rely on a strategy I call counternostalgia, a look back in fury at the
sexual ‘‘excesses’’ of the immature, pathological, and diseased pre-AIDS
generation. Counternostalgia operates within a wider discursive assertion
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
that death necessarily marks a gay man’s future because sin has charac-
terized his past, a blame game that makes illness proof positive that the af-
flicted have lurked in the dark dens of perversion, relinquishing all claims
to compassion, comprehension, or credibility. Under pressure from AIDS
activists and critics who challenge this narrative of blame, the story shifts
from individual victims to the practices of sexual culture more generally, a
supposedly less cruel because more abstract gesture. Even if individual gay
men are not genetically or psychologically programmed for self-destruction,
this story goes, these men have produced a culture, centered on reckless
perversion and unthinking abandon, that contains the seeds of death and
dissolution. A morbid and pathologizing essentialism is displaced from indi-
viduals to the collective, but the causal logic of blame still prevails.
Counternostalgia is dangerous not only because it represents the
past inaccurately but also because it limits present options for nonnormative
identification, intimacy, and pleasure. The recent resurgence of assimilative
political initiatives—for gay marriage, for humane military policy, and for do-
mestic partner benefits, for instance—is sustained by narratives that, in the
guise of exposing a corrupt sexual past, directly or implicitly urge queers to
distance themselves from the tainted past and to structure their lives along
cleaner, healthier lines that end up replicating normative heterosexuality.
Working in a culture of sexual paranoia so profound that such ideological
work is easily carried out in the guise of common sense, counternostalgia
represents sex as a fixed object of moral evaluation, obscures the dominant
culture’s role in establishing sexual ‘‘norms’’ as a technology of power, and
denies the agency of ‘‘deviants’’ who use unsanctioned sex to challenge the
normalizing structures of mainstream America.9
9. Why gay men would want to serve the interests of a ‘‘general public’’ that has made little
effort to serve gay interests is a complex question, and not one I can fully answer. On the
most banal level, gay men, as AIDS activists and theorists have long pointed out, are part
of that ‘‘general public,’’ which not only entitles gays (theoretically) to civil rights and police
protection but frequently makes gays agents as well as objects of mainstream thought.
Counternostalgia is also partially understandable in light of the fear that led many gay men
in the early years of the epidemic, when safer sex education was scarce and changed
rapidly, to conceive of celibacy or monogamy as the only viable responses to a sexually
transmitted virus. One could argue as well that gay men, shocked at the decimation of a
subculture they had worked so hard to create and by the deaths of those with whom they
inhabited it, have sought to defend themselves by minimizing the value of what was lost.
Finally, there is an implied prophylactic syllogism of blame: If the sexual revolution caused
illness, and one distances oneself from the sexual revolution, one is therefore distanced
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
Nor is counternostalgia the exclusive province of such obvious neo-

cons as Rotello, Signorile, and Sullivan. Indeed, one might argue that coun-
ternostalgia, rendered compatible with queerness in cultural and theoretical
productions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, to a large degree enabled
its pervasive deployment by gay neocons in the late 1990s, and, more than
police crackdowns or city regulations, has been responsible for the conser-
vatizing of queer culture and politics generally. One might look, for instance,
at Leo Bersani’s essay ‘‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’’ and Gregg Araki’s film
The Living End (1992), both of which seem as far from Rotello as queers
can get from neocons. While queer theorists have rightly denounced Ro-
tello, they have embraced Bersani and hailed Araki’s film as the harbin-
ger of a new queer cinema.10 Yet both the essay and the film exemplify
how counternostalgia makes queerness compatible with mainstream social
values, paving the way for Rotello and his ilk.
In his 1987 essay, Bersani encourages readers to reject depictions of
sex as community building and to acknowledge what sex really is, namely,
a social ‘‘dysfunction’’ that ‘‘brings people together only to plunge them into
a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance’’ that drives them apart. In par-
ticular, the rectum, with its potential for ongoing pleasure and its refusal of
the finitude of climax, is, for Bersani, ‘‘the grave in which the masculine ideal
. . . of proud subjectivity is buried.’’ 11 Welcoming stimuli that shatter ego and
hence contradicting ‘‘the sacrosanct value of selfhood’’ (RG, 222), the rec-
tum challenges the status of power itself since, Bersani argues, an ego-
affirming sexuality generates a phallic social order.
My concern here is less with Bersani’s faith in the devastating psy-
chic power of the rectum (although it fails to account for how an asshole
can get fucked and still be an asshole) than with how his representation
of the relationship between the sexual and the social enables his dismissal
from illness. See Douglas Crimp, ‘‘Mourning and Militancy,’’ in Out There: Marginalization
and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and
Cornel West (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 233–45.
10. On Sex Panic’s attacks on Rotello and Signorile, see Crain, ‘‘Pleasure Principles.’’ Ro-
tello, like other gay journalists who advocate assimilation and invite government regula-
tion, has been called a ‘‘turd’’ by Sex Panic and a ‘‘neoconservative’’ by Michael Warner,
who, in his July 1997 editorial in the Nation, exhorts queers to ignore Rotello and to heed
instead a host of queer theorists, including Leo Bersani. Warner and Berlant cite ‘‘Is the
Rectum a Grave?’’ in ‘‘Sex in Public,’’ 566. On the queer aesthetics of The Living End, see
Michael Bronski, ‘‘Reel Politick,’’ Z (September 1992): 73–75.
11. Leo Bersani, ‘‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’’ October 43 (1987): 222. Hereafter, this work is
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
cited parenthetically as RG.

of the sociosexual narratives of the 1970s. The ego-shattering potential of

the rectum has been obscured, according to Bersani, by the ‘‘redemptive
project’’ to ‘‘rewrite sex’’ (RG, 221) undertaken by such diverse critics and
historians as Simon Watney, Jeffrey Weeks, and Pat Califia. Bersani alleges
that these writers carry on ‘‘the rhetoric of sexual liberation in the ’60s and
’70s’’ (RG, 219) that, in making sex the basis of community, identity, or poli-
tics, inscribes a phallic logic that disguises sex as ‘‘self-swelling, as psychic
tumescence’’ (RG, 218). According to Bersani, only Catherine MacKinnon
and Andrea Dworkin join him in having ‘‘the courage to be explicit about
the profound moral repulsion with sex that inspires the entire project’’ (RG,
215). In exposing the other deluded sons and daughters of the sexual revo-
lution, Bersani offers his bottom line: We must acknowledge and celebrate
the valuable ‘‘humiliation of the self’’ (RG, 217) that renders sex ‘‘anticom-
munal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving’’ (RG, 215).
While Bersani’s counternostalgic dismissal of the redemptive histo-
ries of the 1970s apparently leads to a queering of identity (politics), it leads
as well to the inscription first of women and then of gay men within norma-
tive sex/gender constructions. In accounting for misogyny, for instance, Ber-
sani writes, ‘‘If, for example, we assume that the oppression of women dis-
guises a fearful male response to the seductiveness of an image of sexual
powerlessness, then the most brutal machismo is really part of a domesti-
cating, even sanitizing project’’ (RG, 221). But what marks women as ‘‘pow-
erless’’ prior to the invention of ‘‘brutal machismo’’? Bersani answers—and
his case for the shattering power of the rectum rests on this assertion—by
claiming that women are socially powerless by virtue of being penetrated,
passively, by the penis. Such a formulation begs the question of how sex
comes to be known as penetration and not, say, incorporation, a semantic
shift that would make the insertee active and the inserter passive. Bersani
asserts the rectum’s power for ego dissolution only by paradoxically inscrib-
ing normative gender in ways that render the sexual subject in fixed and lim-
ited terms. Bersani seems particularly comfortable generalizing about sex
between men who, if one believes the essay, have only anal sex, have never
enjoyed sex not centered on the phallus, and lust only after butch men: ‘‘Par-
ody is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know this. Much campy talk is pa-
rodic, and while that may be fun at a dinner party, if you’re out to make some-
one you turn off the camp’’ (RG, 208). The interpellation at work in Bersani’s
essay becomes clear in the pronoun shift from all to you, and is policed on
the border of disclosure and duplicity: Because ‘‘all gay men know’’ the ex-
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
clusive desirability of butchness, any gay man who claims otherwise is com-
plicit in keeping a ‘‘secret’’ that only Bersani, apparently, is brave enough to

speak.12
Having disavowed other historical accounts of gay male pleasure,
Bersani re-creates ‘‘real’’ gay sex in the image of its most conservative
straight counterpart.13 He compares gay ‘‘bottoms’’ in anal intercourse to
(presumably straight) women, who, he joins Dworkin in asserting, can never
be ‘‘active’’ during sex. Bersani accounts for violence against children with
AIDS, for example, by claiming that they evoke ‘‘the infinitely more seductive
and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse
the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman’’ (RG, 212). The ‘‘top’’ in both vaginal
and anal intercourse, being ‘‘phallic,’’ becomes implicitly masculine, since
women, according to Bersani and Dworkin, can never wield the phallus.
Bersani’s normative rendering of gay male sex as the straight mis-
sionary position is connected to his assertion that the ‘‘rewriting of sex’’
12. In Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),
Michael Lucey astutely analyzes how Bersani’s presentation of a ‘‘pure’’ sex act existing
solely in the present is undermined ironically by the very acts—of remembering (inher-
ent in writing) and of projecting a utopian moment when the rectum shatters the ego—
that Bersani chastises in others: ‘‘When one writes about sex it is not so easy, no matter
how hard one wriggles, to distinguish between past, future, and present, between reminis-
cences, anticipation, and enjoyment. One could write about sex for years and never get to
a pure present without politics. Bersani’s shattering present is ultimately inseparable from
and even indistinguishable from the past and the future. It carries with it the structure of
its own nostalgia’’ (40).
13. Bersani’s focus on anal intercourse and his metaphoric transformation of it into nor-
mative straight sex can be contextualized through Cindy Patton’s description of how the
1986 ‘‘Heterosexual AIDS Panic’’ dramatically changed public discourse about safe sex:
‘‘Since among heterosexuals, or at least in the public culture of heterosexual men, penile-
vaginal intercourse is the hegemonic and identity-creating act, the meaning of safe sex
shifted toward abstinence, monogamy, and the use of condoms.’’ The heterosexualization
of AIDS in the mainstream media then changed sexual discourse in the gay male com-
munity, where, after 1986, ‘‘safe sex discussions inevitably began with a discussion of the
importance of condoms, and only then discussed the range of other possibilities for a ful-
filling sex life.’’ See Patton, Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990), 47–48. While Pat-
ton’s description of the heterosexualization of AIDS may help account for Bersani’s sexual
metaphors, it also renders more suspicious the alignment of gay male sexuality with ‘‘the
public culture of heterosexual men.’’ Similarly investigating Bersani’s naturalization of anal
sex as the missionary position, Michael Lucey wonders ‘‘whether by assuming the abject
position the gender binary has constructed, [if] the reactivation and perpetuation of that
structure could be so definitively resisted—just as one might wonder if one particular way
of having sex (and one particular way of imagining what is going on in that act) would be
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
the most analytically evident route to such an end’’ (Lucey, Gide’s Bent, 89).
is undertaken not in response to a decade of antisex rhetoric generated

by AIDS hysteria, antiporn feminism, and garden-variety homophobia, but
in response to the ‘‘moral repulsion’’ we all feel with the sexual narratives
spawned by the ‘‘sexual revolution’’ of the late 1960s and 1970s. In Bersani’s
account, not only do the 1980s—the historical moment of the essay itself—
get off the hook, its gender norms and anticommunal pursuit of radical indi-
vidualism are naturalized as psychic truth.
The difficulty of representing alternatives to current sexual conser-
vatism once gay men enter the ‘‘amnesia archive’’ becomes evident in The
Living End, in which two gay men, Luke and Jon, respond defiantly to their
seropositivity by taking to the road, driving aimlessly, shooting up ATMs, and
fucking with and without condoms, in public and in private. The appropriated
‘‘road-trip’’ narrative calls attention to and frustrates the abjection that audi-
ences have come to expect as an appropriate closure to the story of AIDS,
while it, at the same time, mocks the possibility that a narrative produced
in a homophobic culture with intense fears of death and no national health
care could or should end ‘‘happily ever after.’’
While The Living End refuses to make individual gay men’s sexual
acts the cause of their inevitable despair and demise, it does engage a
causal narrative of blame that introduces into the film a tension between two
historical narratives: one that Bersani might call redemptive and the other
counternostalgic. Counternostalgia enters the film in the scene following the
first night Luke and Jon spend together, as Luke explains his AIDS-inspired
philosophy over breakfast: ‘‘So figure this: There’s thousands, maybe mil-
lions of us walking around with this thing inside of us, this time bomb making
our futures finite. Suddenly I realize: we got nothing to lose. We can say,
‘Fuck work. Fuck the system. Fuck everything.’ Don’t you get it? We’re totally
free. We can do whatever the fuck we want to do.’’ 14 Luke’s conception of
freedom teeters, in this scene, between an oppositional stand toward obli-
gatory capitalism (‘‘Fuck work. Fuck the system’’) and the hopeless lack
of commitment (‘‘Fuck everything’’) that is, according to conventional AIDS
narratives, the teleological necessity of an HIV-positive diagnosis. Luke’s in-
ability to sustain opposition without lapsing into despair—his ‘‘Fuck every-
thing’’ ends in his later exasperated claim, ‘‘I don’t care about anything any-
more’’—appears to arise from his attempt to purchase his freedom through
14. All passages quoted from The Living End (1992) are from my own transcript of the
video release. The film was directed by Gregg Araki, produced by Desperate Pictures, and
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
released by Strand Releasing.

a counternostalgic discourse of generational blame. Immediately preceding

the lines quoted above, Luke tells Jon:
I mean, we’re both gonna die. Maybe in ten years, maybe next week.
But it’s not like I want to live forever and get old and fat and die in this
ugly, stupid world anyway. I mean, we’re victims of the sexual revo-
lution. The generation before us had all the fun, and we get to pick
up the tab. Anyone who got fucked before safe sex is fucked. I think
it’s all part of the neo-Nazi, Republican final solution. Germ warfare,
you know? Genocide.
If Luke refuses the closure of despair, if he knows he is not to blame for his
own seropositivity, he can claim his innocence only by displacing guilt from
the individual to the cultural past. It remains unclear, in Luke’s account, how
the ‘‘fun’’ had by a previous generation of gay men and Republican genocide
can be responsible for AIDS, but both somehow are; the ‘‘sexual revolution,’’
rather than constituting a challenge to conservatism, acts in tandem with
the political climate that allowed the epidemic to flourish.
Yet Luke’s counternostalgic narrative generates contradictions that
come dramatically to the surface at the film’s conclusion. For while Luke
may want to distance himself from a previous generation of gay men whose
‘‘fun’’ has gotten him in his present fix, only by engaging in what Bersani
calls the ‘‘redemptive reinvention of sex’’ (RG, 215) as defiance and as the
basis of countercultural companionship can Luke express his anger and
achieve the agency that helps him escape isolation and despair. In the film’s
concluding scene, when Jon, sick and disgusted with Luke’s antics, decides
to go home, Luke rapes him, holding the barrel of a revolver in his own
mouth and vowing to pull the trigger as he climaxes. The film has reached
the despair that the AIDS narrative seemingly requires as closure. Yet the
film diverts the conventional AIDS narrative at the last moment, when Luke
throws aside his gun and Jon, who has slapped Luke and walked away, re-
turns. The film’s last shot shows Luke and Jon sitting side by side in the
middle of an arid landscape, leaning on one another’s shoulder. Each turns
out to be the other’s support, literally and figuratively, in a narrative that
stops short of revealing where these men might go next but that also refuses
to sentence them to isolation and death-figured-as-suicide.
The film’s conclusion suggests, then, that Luke owes more than one
debt to the previous generation’s enabling fantasy of sex as community and
of sexuality as resistance. While counternostalgic discourses that vilify poli-
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
tics or companionship based on sexual pleasure place Jon and Luke in the
overdetermined narratives of inevitable illness (‘‘Anyone who got fucked be-

fore safe sex is fucked’’) and despair (‘‘I mean, we’re gonna die’’), the con-
nections they forge from their sexual pleasures, neither entirely arbitrary nor
ineffective in opposing hatred, prove the most effective tools for resisting the
victimizing narratives of heteronormative national culture. Granted, those
older sexual narratives cannot be resurrected uncritically to meet the politi-
cal demands of the film’s historical moment. Not only has AIDS made it dif-
ficult to see some forms of sexual pleasure as liberating (indeed, the film
associates Luke’s desire to be fucked without a condom with his other
despair-induced suicidal behaviors); it has rendered problematic the equa-
tion of sex and liberty not, as Bersani claims, because sex is ‘‘anticom-
munal’’ or ‘‘antinurturing’’ but because devastating losses, despite heroic
efforts, have made liberty itself seem like a utopian project. Yet if the sexual
narratives of the 1970s cannot be adapted uncritically, neither, the film
seems to suggest, should they be left behind. Given the tension between
counternostalgia and sexual redemption, the film shows the latter, while not
perfect, to be its protagonists’ best bet for ensuring a living end.
Sexual culture, as Araki’s ‘‘road film’’ makes unmistakably clear, is
not a settled space (if one tearoom closes, another will take its place) but
a memory of practices, signs, and positionalities that enables tearooms,
discos, and cruising areas to travel without disrupting—or at least not for
very long—their functions. The impermanence of these spaces, if anything,
suggests the resilience of the networks through which culture circulates,
for, as Berlant and Warner acknowledge, it is relationships, created through
shared memory, that provide the architecture of the queer world. Crack-
downs on space alone cannot disrupt a public culture predicated, in many
ways, on regulation and diasporic migration, but a crackdown on memory
can. I have offered these examples of counternostalgia to show how per-
vasive the attack on collective and individual memory is, and how closely
allied that assault is with the interpellation of gay men within normative pub-
lic culture. These attacks come not only from the neoconservative ‘‘thems’’
externalized from queer culture by the panic politics of space but from within
queer culture itself. Although drawn from three very different genres ad-
dressing potentially variant audiences, these accounts reveal how counter-
nostalgia circulates between subculture (Araki’s film) and superculture
(NPR), from accounts under attack by queer theory (Rotello) to the theorists
that queers have used to challenge those accounts (Bersani). Demonstrat-
ing the false purity of a spatial differentiation between theory and journal-
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
ism, between sub- and national cultures, the circulation of counternostalgia

links these texts in a shared strategy of sexual normalizing that, in structur-

ing the relationship of representation, memory, and identity in a syndrome of
blame and disavowal, risks the viability of queer public intimacy and culture.
The most effective response to counternostalgia has come through

what Michel Foucault calls countermemory, a competing narrative of the
past composed of memories that exceed official public history.15 Noting that
resistant memories show disempowered people ‘‘not who they were, but
what they must remember having been,’’ Foucault contends that ‘‘if one con-
trols people’s memory, one controls their dynamism. And one also controls
their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles.’’ 16 Knowledge of
previous struggles emerges as a specifically queer countermemory, a way
to ‘‘remember having been’’ oppositionally and creatively sexual: ‘‘Homo-
sexuality is an historic occasion to re-open effective and relational virtuali-
ties, not so much through intrinsic qualities of the homosexual, but due to
the biases against the position he occupies.’’ 17 Among the ‘‘virtualities’’ Fou-
cault imagines becoming visible through countermemory are the kinds of
social relationships developed in the urban queer spaces: ‘‘A way of life can
be shared among individuals of different age, status, and social activity. It
can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized.
It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics.’’ 18 For
Foucault, gay male desire is itself a form of memory: ‘‘For a homosexual,
the best moment of love is likely to be when the lover leaves in the taxi.
It is when the act is over and the boy is gone that one begins to dream
about the warmth of his body, the quality of his smile, the tone of his voice.
This is why the great homosexual writers of our culture (Cocteau, Genet,
Burroughs) can write so elegantly about the sexual act itself, because the
homosexual imagination is for the most part concerned with reminiscing.’’ 19
15. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ in Language, Counter-Memory,

Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977),
160–64.
16. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Film and Popular Memory,’’ in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966–84
(New York: Semiotext[e], 1989), 92.
17. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ in Foucault Live, 207.
18. Foucault, ‘‘Friendship,’’ 207.
19. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,’’ in Foucault Live, 224. I am indebted to
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
David Halperin for his insightful analysis of the possibilities for queer politics opened up by
Viewed through the lens of queer memory as set forth by Foucault, intimacy
becomes a shared history as much as a shared space; internalized as be-
havior patterns through its integration into memorial narratives of pleasure,
intimacy becomes the basis for a collective futurity.
Gay countermemory has already provided oppositional representa-
tions of pleasure that inscribe alternative public intimacies. The ironic titles
of three recent novels—Brad Gooch’s Golden Age of Promiscuity (1996),
Ethan Mordden’s How Long Has This Been Going On? (1995), and Felice
Picano’s Like People in History (1995)—suggest the exclusion of gay men
and lesbians from conventional history: Denied a historical ‘‘golden age,’’
gay public life, the mysterious ‘‘this’’ that the mainstream doesn’t know is
‘‘going on,’’ has existed as an ‘‘intense subtext’’ 20 of sexual subculture (‘‘pro-
miscuity’’). At the same time as they expose the exclusion of gays from con-
ventional history, these novels use countermemories to create communal
subjectivity, making sexual culture a site of creative reimagining rather than
a dangerous lure or a paradise lost.
Over the course of Mordden’s ambitious novel, for instance, mem-
ory becomes the means to codify and circulate everyday practices, provid-
ing gay men with ways to recognize and communicate with each other in
the face of violence, death, or dislocation. Mordden renders the relationship
of memory, self-invention, and public intimacy most explicit in the story of
Jim and Henry, former college classmates who are surprised to find each
other in a New York gay bar. Rather than share conventional reminiscences,
Mordden writes, ‘‘this time they are going to work out a very different kind
of nostalgia—whom they had crushes on in college, who else was, what
exactly they themselves knew they were—the conversation, in short, that
marks the two men’s passing from acquaintances to comrades.’’ 21 These
collaborative acts of self-inventive memory predicated on desire—exactly
the kinds of memory counternostalgia urges us to forget—create bonds
(‘‘One hour of such talk and you can be intimates for life’’ [HL, 233]) that sur-
vive homophobic isolation and the debilitating grief caused by AIDS. When,
at the conclusion of the novel, Henry, contemplating the present status of
gay cultural politics, laments that ‘‘probably no political movement in his-
Foucault’s writings on history; see, for instance, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiog-
raphy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 104–6.
20. Brad Gooch, The Golden Age of Promiscuity (New York: Knopf, 1996), 16.
21. Ethan Mordden, How Long Has This Been Going On (New York: Villard Books, 1995),
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
233. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as HL.

tory counted as little solidarity as this one’’ (HL, 584), his faith is restored
by an act of memory. As the Gay Pride march stops to honor the memo-
ries of those who have died, Henry remembers his college friend Jim, who
died from AIDS the previous year. It is a moment of anguish, but also of re-
newed optimism, for Henry, for, despite the lack of solidarity in gay life, ‘‘on
this afternoon, the feeling was unity. This was the one day when everyone
In the Life seemed part of a great striding giant of a history that would never
cease its advance’’ (HL, 584).
Mordden shows, however, that gay cultural politics are threatened at
least as much by the paralyzing generational split caused by counternostal-
gia—represented in the novel, as in Bersani and Araki, as perfectly con-
sistent with queer ‘‘world making’’—as by AIDS itself. When Blue, a 1970s
hustler turned 1990s AIDS activist, joins a group of twenty-something
queers in a chic Lower East Side coffeehouse, he’s shocked to hear one
woman declare, ‘‘ ‘Well, I’m sick of Old Gay . . . Drag, and opera, and Fire
Island. Gyms! ’ ’’ (HL, 568). The only hope for the future, the novel sug-
gests, lies with those of the younger generation who reject counternostal-
gia in order to draw survival lessons from the past. In a scene set during
Gay Pride Weekend 1991, two young lesbians are watching a documen-
tary on pre-Stonewall gay life. When one woman asks, ‘‘ ‘Do you relate to
any of this?’ ’’ her lover responds, ‘‘ ‘It’s not us. . . . But it’s something. It’s
history.’ ’’ ‘‘ ‘Maybe it’ll make sense later on,’ ’’ the first woman ventures, to
which her lover asserts, ‘‘ ‘It makes sense to me now’ ’’ (HL, 559). Only if his-
tory ‘‘makes sense’’ can gay countermemories heal the antagonism gener-
ated not by AIDS but by counternostalgic discourse that makes community
a suspect concept.
While this novel suggests the importance of countermemory for sus-
taining the cultural practices of those gay men who came of age in the 1960s
and 1970s, and who have experienced the decimation of their social net-
works by AIDS, several films have focused on the value of countermemory
for younger queers coming of age in a post-AIDS era, asserting, in con-
trast to counternostalgia, that the past is an invaluable tool in the hands of
young queers, not their enemy or their downfall. In Longtime Companion
(1990), the film hailed as the first mainstream cinematic treatment of AIDS,
the concluding sequence shows the three surviving characters standing on
the beach at Fire Island, imagining the moment when a cure is found for
AIDS. Suddenly crowds of cheering people, including the characters who
have died, come running onto the beach from the boardwalk, embracing
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
their living friends. This scene was virulently criticized for its manipulative
and sentimental suggestion that the losses to AIDS will ever be recovered,
even in fantasy.22 But this scene presents a fantasy not of recovery but rather
of continuity, of gay men who will use their identification with the past to
strengthen their determination to fight in the future. When the fantasy sud-
denly ends and one of the characters says, ‘‘I just want to be there,’’ the word
there shifts queer community from a spatial to a temporal location, signify-
ing both the past and the future, the lost community envisioned in the fan-
tasy and the future moment when the epidemic ends. Both combine in the
speaker, who is moved by his memories of the past to demonstrate against
government inaction on AIDS, thereby helping to inscribe gay men’s cultural
future.
Like other countermemories, Longtime Companion suggests that
posing alternatives to counternostalgia can open possibilities for public inti-
macy and hence strengthen resistance to isolation, guilt, and despair. A
number of recent queer films have followed suit in using countermemory to
resist the effects of counternostalgia. Raoul O’Connell’s A Friend of Dorothy
(1995) capitalizes on gay male cultural memory as the source of public inti-
macy and survival. The film’s protagonist, Winston, sets off to Greenwich
Village to begin his freshman year at NYU armed with his Barbra Streisand,
Bette Midler, and Cher albums. These singers, whom a homophobic char-
acter in the film identifies as ‘‘fag divas,’’ provide Winston with comfort and,
ultimately, a boyfriend. While shopping for a Streisand CD, Winston makes
eye contact with a man perusing the Judy Garland selections. After camping
for a few moments, the boy asks Winston if he is ‘‘a friend of Dorothy’s,’’ pre-
Stonewall code for ‘‘Are you gay?’’ When Winston answers, ‘‘Yes, I guess I
am,’’ the man responds, ‘‘Someone should teach you to smile when you say
that’’ and asks him out to, of all nostalgic locales, a piano bar. The film ends
by suggesting that icons of the gay cultural past continue to provide places
to meet, signs of identification, and modes of communication.
22. Although the crowd booed the director and author of Longtime Companion when they
spoke at a New York Gay Pride rally in 1990, Simon Watney has produced an appreciative
reading of the film’s fantasy ending that parallels my own. The dream sequence, Watney
writes, ‘‘speaks of the most simple and passionate wish that none of this had ever hap-
pened, that our dearest friends might indeed come back to life again, that we miss them
horribly. This is surely not to be dismissed as ‘denial’ or ‘delusion,’ but should be under-
stood as a necessary catharsis, and moreover a catharsis that binds our communities
even closer in their fight to save lives.’’ See Watney, ‘‘Short-Term Companions: AIDS as
Popular Entertainment,’’ in A Leap in the Dark: AIDS, Art, and Contemporary Cultures, ed.
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
Allan Klusacek and Ken Morrison (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1992), 163.
Mark Christopher’s film The Dead Boys’ Club, part of a collection

entitled Boys Shorts (1994), makes the relationship between memory and
public intimacy its central diegetic focus. In the opening sequence, the mise-
en-scène suggests that Toby, the young protagonist, is torn between two
generations: In one hand, he holds that depressing AIDS emblem, a bottle
of bleach, which he brings to his cousin who is cleaning up following the
death of a friend; in the other, he holds that account of the gay male sexual
revolution, Dancer from the Dance. The impact of the novel becomes clear
when Toby cruises a man on the street and takes his phone number, but
the antiseptic and antisex ethos of his own day reasserts itself when Toby
throws the number away. In the following scene, the viewer is introduced to
Packard, Toby’s gay older cousin, and to Packard’s friend Charles, a swish-
ing, wig-wearing queen of the old school, who immediately begins to hit on
Toby. The film’s contrast between the anxious, undersexed young man and
the humorous, sociable older men highlights the generational change that is
its central concern and shows that cultural values of the past become more,
not less, valuable in the context of AIDS. When the film introduces the older
gay men, they are packing up the belongings of a friend who has just died
from AIDS. Their wit and shared memories comfort them in their grief. For
them, AIDS is not the denouement in a narrative of selfish recklessness but
the decimation of a gay culture essential to survival, especially for those
caught in the imperatives of counternostalgia. When Toby doesn’t know who
disco diva Donna Summer is, Charles laments, ‘‘Your generation will never
know what it missed,’’ to which Packard responds, ‘‘I think they do.’’
The film’s principal hook highlights the contrast between the sexual
austerity of the present and the sex-positiveness of the past. Packard gives
Toby his friend’s favorite ‘‘slut shoes,’’ and when Toby tries them on, he is
given a miraculous view into the sexual underworld of the 1970s, placing him
among scantily clad men in leather cruising dark, disco-filled corridors. Toby
at first tries to get rid of the shoes, but, representatives of the repressed
cultural unconscious that they are, they continually return to him. When he
wears them out to a bar one night, he gets picked up by the boy whose
phone number he threw away on the street, and, when he wakes up in the
morning in the boy’s bed and finds the condom Packard gave him still un-
opened in his pocket, Toby assumes, in the logic of counternostalgia, that
his glimpse into the older sexual culture has led him to reckless, unsafe sex.
The past has risked his health, Toby believes, and he refuses to see his
one-night stand when he returns the shoes Toby has left behind. The film
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
draws the reader away from Toby’s counternostalgic conclusions, however,

showing us the open condom packages that Toby cannot see. One-night
stands, bar culture, discos—none of these is antithetical to responsibility
and health, the film implies; on the contrary, they are potentially the source
of companionship and pleasure.
The Dead Boys’ Club acknowledges that we cannot wholly reclaim
the past, for AIDS has changed the past as much for Packard and Charles
as for Toby. But to disavow the past, to deny its representational importance
for the present and the future, is equally futile, as the trope of the continually
returning shoes demonstrates. The past will not be left behind; like the pro-
tagonist of Gloria Gaynor’s disco hit, it will survive. And if Toby wants to sur-
vive, he must accept the past and embrace the mutual responsibility orga-
nized around the shared signifier gay developed by an older sexual culture
that makes safe sex possible between men. Ultimately, Toby reconciles the
present with the past: The last time Toby throws the shoes away, a street
merchant finds them and places them among his wares. When Toby, appar-
ently rethinking his rejection, reaches for the shoes, his hand touches the
hand of another young gay man, who is also reaching for them, and they
smile at one another as the film ends. Through his experiences with the
past—represented by the community practices of his cousin no less than by
the literal view the shoes afford—Toby completes the pass fumbled at the
film’s start. If completely reentering the past is an impossibility (signified by
the contemporary production of ’70s footage), the ‘‘past’’ can be rendered
as a cultural discourse, as countermemories, that will enable new and more
pleasurable narratives today: endings-in-sex rather than the sex-as-ending
that counternostalgia requires. The representations of then and now coexist
in the same film as they coexist in the same culture. By accepting that sex
equals neither death nor irresponsibility but, rather, companionship, plea-
sure, and knowledge, Toby ends up recognizing that he shares desires with
other men, both living and dead.
In arguing that gay men must reclaim the past as a discourse that en-
ables alternative sexual consciousness and collectivity in the present, I am
not arguing that there is a transparency to memory (we all know what the
1970s ‘‘meant’’ to gay men then, or indeed that the decade ever meant the
same thing to significant numbers of gay men). The memories people share
will be diverse and divergent, and the tension between memory narratives
will be productive of necessary change within urban gay culture. An impor-
tant reminder of such productive tensions is provided by one of the most
eloquent memory narratives on film: Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989).
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
In this powerful documentary of the often violent tensions between African

American and gay male culture, Riggs evokes life in 1970s San Francisco in
order to condemn its (and his own internalized) racism:
I pretended not to notice the absence of black images in this new gay
life, in bookstores, poster shops, film festivals, even my own fanta-
sies. Something in Oz was amiss, but I tried not to notice. I was intent
on my search for my reflection, love, affirmation, in eyes of blue, gray,
green. Searching, I discovered something I didn’t expect, something
decades of determined assimilation cannot blind me to. In this great,
gay Mecca, I was an invisible man. I had no shadow, no substance,
no place, no history, no reflection.23
Tied to his condemnation of gay male racism (‘‘I quit the Castro, no longer
my home, my Mecca’’), however, is a certain longing, a sense that a more
inclusive Castro would have been a Mecca, or at any rate a refuge from
the homophobia Riggs also condemns in the African American community.
Riggs engages in a double act of memory—looking back at the Castro but
also back at African American history and his personal home life—in order
to create from the doubled rememberings a hybrid memory narrative that
allows him to untie his story. Riggs’s sound track mixes black gay divas
(such as Sylvester) with Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, mixes footage of
the March on Selma with that of Gay Men of African Descent marching in
a Gay Pride parade. From these nostalgic juxtapositions, Riggs diversifies
gay memory (‘‘Each gay community does different things,’’ as one man in
the documentary says, ‘‘and I think that’s cute’’) and allows a remember-
ing that works for black gay men (‘‘older, stronger rhythms resonate within
me, sustain my spirit, silence the clock’’). Far from replicating the values of
a historical moment, Riggs’s countermemory corrects the shortcomings of
those values and enhances the possibilities for creating a more viable gay
community.
In looking at these examples of queer countermemory, I want to ex-
pand the agenda of queer activism and theory beyond the politics of space
to a recognition of the important role memory plays in the making and break-
ing of queer worlds.24 By taking too casual an approach to memory, we
23. All passages quoted from Tongues Untied (1989) are from my own transcript of the
video release. The film was directed by Marlon T. Riggs and released by Frameline Dis-
tributors.
24. In arguing against the metaphoric deployment of ‘‘space’’ as a totalizing figure for pub-
lic culture, I do not mean to deny the importance of ‘‘queer space’’ as a material basis
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
for desire and community. See, for example, Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture
risk letting our historiography disastrously change our history. The politics
of memory are particularly important in relation to AIDS. Even before the
Names Project, a common refrain in the gay community has been that we
must not forget those who have died. While these individual acts of mem-
ory are urgently important, we must also remember and continue to shape
and deploy our memories of social networks, political strategies, and cul-
tural theories, not to idealize or to reinvent the past—an impossible enter-
prise even if it were desirable—but to think critically about which stories are
credited with access to the truth, to the social ‘‘real.’’ Only in so doing will
gay men’s sexual representations transform the restrictive and normalizing
work of much contemporary culture. In telling different stories of the past,
in other words, we are avoiding unnecessary loss and becoming present to
ourselves. To look back is, after all, to refuse the imperative laid down at the
destruction of Sodom.
and Same-Sex Desire (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1997); and Christopher
Reed, ‘‘Imminent Domain: Queer Space in the Built Environment,’’ Art Journal (winter
Tseng 2000.5.26 09:03 OCV:1
1996): 64–70.

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Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories

boundary 2, Volume 27, Number 2, Summer 2000, pp. 149-175 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by University of the Philippines - Diliman at 12/15/11 6:53AM GMT

Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories

‘‘All profound changes in consciousness by their very nature, bring

boundary 2 27:2, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press.

150 boundary 2 / Summer 2000

I found myself experiencing quite a bit of ‘‘Seventies envy’’ lately—

14 July 1997, 15–19.

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 151

As a fairly representative member of the elite of ‘‘Generation Q’’ . . .

1980s what occurred was a regeneration of activist spirit to ‘‘ﬁght

152 boundary 2 / Summer 2000

AIDS.’’ Well, it’s been years now—and the community understands

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 153

154 boundary 2 / Summer 2000

Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997): 63–78.

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 155

1998): 547–66. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as SP.

156 boundary 2 / Summer 2000

people inhabit’’ (SP, 555) as the only locations of (a necessarily deferred)

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 157

5. See Crain, ‘‘Pleasure Principles,’’ 26–37.

158 boundary 2 / Summer 2000

by years of right-wing politics and AIDS phobia, which are orchestrated to

Gay men have themselves contributed to the normalizing of sexual

A New Stone Wall,’’ Nation (14 July 1997), 15.

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 159

On the one hand is the specter of governmental involvement in gay

by Burrelle’s Transcripts. Subsequent references are from this transcript.

160 boundary 2 / Summer 2000

Neel again glosses a gay man’s testimony so as to produce a conventional

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 161

162 boundary 2 / Summer 2000

Nor is counternostalgia the exclusive province of such obvious neo-

cited parenthetically as RG.

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 163

of the sociosexual narratives of the 1970s. The ego-shattering potential of

164 boundary 2 / Summer 2000

plicit in keeping a ‘‘secret’’ that only Bersani, apparently, is brave enough to

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 165

is undertaken not in response to a decade of antisex rhetoric generated

released by Strand Releasing.

166 boundary 2 / Summer 2000

a counternostalgic discourse of generational blame. Immediately preceding

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 167

overdetermined narratives of inevitable illness (‘‘Anyone who got fucked be-

ism, between sub- and national cultures, the circulation of counternostalgia

168 boundary 2 / Summer 2000

links these texts in a shared strategy of sexual normalizing that, in structur-

The most effective response to counternostalgia has come through

15. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ in Language, Counter-Memory,

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 169

233. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as HL.

170 boundary 2 / Summer 2000

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 171

172 boundary 2 / Summer 2000

Mark Christopher’s ﬁlm The Dead Boys’ Club, part of a collection

draws the reader away from Toby’s counternostalgic conclusions, however,

Castiglia / Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories 173

In this powerful documentary of the often violent tensions between African

174 boundary 2 / Summer 2000